Company shows off speed of low-flow toilets

Ryan Barnes, a product representative for American Standard, demonstrates how its low-water toilet will flush 16 golf balls.

To demonstrate, he piled 16 golf balls into a model known as the Cadet 3 Flowise and pushed the lever. Faster than you can say "fore," they disappeared.

"Water efficiency has a black eye based on past performance, but things have gotten much better," said Barnes, a product representative for American Standard, whose national "Responsible Bathroom Water Conservation Tour" was in Evans on Monday.

Toilets of yesteryear used 3.5 gallons per flush, and the mandatory transition to just 1.6 gallons spawned inefficient models that still draw complaints, he said.

Today's growing emphasis on water conservation has spawned vast improvements in toilets, faucets and shower heads that could help Americans save billions of gallons of water.

The mobile demonstration studio was at W.A. Bragg & Co. in Evans as part of a 300-stop tour of sites across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Technology and public demand both accelerate improvements that save water, Barnes said.

The goal of the tour is to show how an average four-person household can reduce annual water consumption by 48,326 gallons simply by upgrades to water-saving fixtures.

Toilets, in particular, have come a long way, thanks to redesigned traps and flush valves that compensate for less water. Field testers, he added, use material as varied as miso paste and hot dogs to evaluate flushability and performance.

"American Standard has invested a lot of time -- and technology," he said, noting that 75 percent of household water consumption is bathroom-related.

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The nice thing about low-flow shower heads, loathsome things that they are, is that the little plug that slows the flow is fairly easy to remove.

The real problem with low-flow potties is that they don't use enough water to deal with the stronger TP that Charmin and Scott are selling to the public. It all just sits in your pipes with all the other elements and turns to paper mache, necessitating an evening's wrestling match with the router snake, followed by an delightful visit from the plumber, who will want to tear up your yard because he thinks the problem is roots in your pipes, even though they're PVC with fused joints. All because there's not enough water to flush crap into the sewer line.

Government needs to get OUT of my bathroom!!
I will be glad to pay for big hot water in my shower.
And I am tired of having to stand over my toilet to supervise the flush and then flushing it two or three times...

roadkill, regarding your 'golf balls don't float' comment....I didn't have room to get into this in our story, but....the field testers and engineers use other things besides golf balls to test potty torque. They also use hot dogs to see if they could flush five or six at a time. They also had these multi-colored imitation you-know-whats that had varying buoyancy levels - and the devices were labeled as "water wigglers..."